The Case For Enhancements
Evaluating the pros and cons to daily substance use to function in society
Research shows that up to 99% of Americans rely on at least one substance for managing stress and coping with daily life. Over 90% of adults regularly consume caffeine to function daily.
In the workplace, 52% of employees admit to using substances like alcohol or cannabis while on the job. Millions of working adults rely on prescriptions, primarily stimulants (like Adderall) to boost focus or depressants (like benzodiazepines and sleep aids) to manage workplace anxiety and sleep.
After attempting 75 Hard, I understand why.
Earlier this year, I attempted the challenge known as 75 Hard. For 75 days, the challenge was to work out twice a day, avoid alcohol, and complete other tasks, such as reading 10 pages of a non-fiction book.
I decided to make it harder by eliminating all substances: THC and caffeine.
I did not finish the challenge ironically due to working out — it was a travel day and I wasn’t able to work out twice. However, once the challenge was over, there was a huge sense of relief. I lasted roughly 28 days into the challenge.
The challenge was a positive one. In my article, Life Is Dull, and That’s the Point, one of the first things I realized was that cutting all substances from one’s daily life is challenging — especially when a life is built around them.
The biggest benefit I take from that challenge is movement. The body is designed to move, and I’ve seen my body transform from moving daily. The second benefit from that challenge is that the body is meant for sobriety.
Even though I was quite irritated most times, I recall the clarity that came from being sober. It was a different sense of perspective.
The point of this article is to describe how substances shape everyday life. The argument is that substances are present and can be used to assist; however, overall, they may lean more negative to the experience.
The goal is to walk as close to sober as possible, with substances offering support as needed.
Without further ado, let’s dive right in.
In This Article, You’ll Learn
Why up to 99% of Americans can’t get through a normal day without a substance and what that reveals about the world we’ve built
What happened when NASA gave spiders caffeine, marijuana, speed, and LSD — and which drug produced the most catastrophic results (it’s not the one you’d guess)
The hidden “tax” every enhancement charges your body
How the modern workforce runs on the exact same trade-offs that destroyed the spiders’ webs
When a substance becomes a strategic tool versus a lifestyle crutch — and how to tell the difference
Most Have to Be Drugged to Function
A report featured in USA Today found that 52% of workers use substances (alcohol, cannabis, or unprescribed pills) during work hours.
More than 90% of US adults use caffeine daily. It is by far the most commonly used daily stimulant to increase alertness and battle fatigue during the workday. Nicotine (via vapes or cigarettes) is also utilized for the same purpose.
The onus for this piece came when I realized trying to work during times of sobriety presented a challenge. When caffeinated, it’s easy to keep working, even though one is fried. Due to caffeine, you just keep going and going. Without caffeine, one gets tired and begins to realize just how much work there is — and begins to evaluate, as I did.
Caffeine blunts one to that and ensures one keeps going.
Daily or weekly reliance on substances to cope with job stress is highly skewed by age; 69% of Gen Z and 68% of Millennials report using substances daily or weekly to cope, more than double the rate of Baby Boomers.
The fact that it’s double the rate for millennials and Gen Z speaks to the damaging impacts of society — one must literally be drugged to function in it. This speaks to my piece on society extracting from you, and one must be buzzed to get by.
What does a society that is heavily reliant on substances look like?
What NASA Learned From Drugging Spiders
In April 1995, researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center published a famous study titled Using Spider-Web Patterns To Determine Toxicities of Chemicals.
The scientists gave European garden spiders various psychoactive substances — including caffeine, marijuana, benzedrine (an amphetamine), and chloral hydrate (a sedative) — to see how their web-building behavior changed.
Each substance altered the spiders’ cognitive and physical capabilities in distinct, highly visible ways:
Caffeine (The Most Chaotic): Surprisingly, caffeine produced the most disastrous results. The spiders lost all sense of geometric symmetry, spinning a completely random, disorganized mess of threads with no functional hub or structure.
Marijuana (The Unfinished Web): Spiders given cannabis started building reasonable webs but quickly lost concentration. They would abandon the project halfway through, leaving massive gaps, and spent extended periods simply resting.
Benzedrine / Speed (The Rushed Web): Under the influence of this amphetamine, spiders spun their webs with great energy but very little focus. They zigzagged erratically, creating large, poorly structured grids lacking fine detail.
Chloral Hydrate / Sleeping Pills (The Incomplete Web): The sedatives caused the spiders to drop off or stop working almost immediately, producing at most a few outer structural lines before quitting entirely.
NASA actually adapted the idea from a German pharmacologist named Peter N. Witt. In 1948, Witt originally started drugging spiders with LSD.
While every other drug tested by Dr. Peter Witt and NASA reduced web regularity, low doses of LSD (around 0.1 to 0.3 micrograms) uniquely increased the geometric symmetry and accuracy of thread spacing.
Small doses of LSD actually caused spiders to build more orderly, mathematically precise webs.
Low Doses: Spiders became completely focused and unbothered by outside distractions. They spent excessive effort spinning webs with perfectly uniform, highly geometric regularity.
High Doses: The positive effect disappeared completely. At high doses, the webs became highly distorted, chaotic, and overly complex, or the spiders stopped spinning altogether.
However, whether this “positive” look translated to an actual survival advantage remains complicated.
I came across this study maybe a decade ago, and it blew my mind. This study was what introduced me to LSD, and during this period I dabbled in LSD and brainstorming. I will say I found the effects positive — and only at the microdose level. This study shows the positive of substances and what’s often lost as the negative as well.
Did any substance have true positives?
From a purely structural and functional standpoint, no drug truly improved the spider’s overall efficiency. The geometric enhancement from low-dose LSD looked ideal to human eyes, but it came with biological trade-offs:
Perfectionism vs. Efficiency: Dr. Peter Witt noted that spiders on low-dose LSD spent too much energy on flawless geometric precision. This hyper-fixation distorted their natural balance between speed and regularity, meaning the perfect web likely offered no real benefit in catching more flies.
The Mescaline Effect: Spiders given mescaline built slightly larger webs, but the spacing was highly irregular, making them less effective as food-gathering tools.
Speed vs. Quality: Under stimulants like Benzedrine and Caffeine, spiders built webs incredibly fast, but the final structures were highly erratic, zigzagging shapes that easily let prey slip through.
Ultimately, the experiments showed that a spider’s central nervous system operates best entirely unmedicated.
Any artificially induced ‘boost’ in one area, such as speed or perfect geometry, resulted in a net loss of overall survival functionality.
So, what does this mean for us as humans?
The Sober Brain Is Already Optimized
The core takeaway from Dr. Witt’s research was that a spider’s sober brain is already highly optimized by hundreds of thousands of years of life. This ties to a theory known as Morphic Resonance, which I discuss here.
The “optimal” web is not a mathematically perfect square grid. The optimal web is a flexible, quickly built trap designed to absorb the kinetic impact of a flying insect.
Any chemical that forces the spider to deviate from its natural programming — whether it makes them lazy (marijuana), frantic (speed), or hyper-obsessive (LSD)— harms their ability to survive. The “boosts” observed are actually a system that is malfunctioning.
I’d argue that this is similar to what humans do. Our brains are highly functional for things that need to be done. But the problem is that our new world is an environment modern man was not built for. Modern man is built for nature and for working in nature, but now we have technology as the realm in which to work.
This stress — these hours of working longer than intended is what we call normal and was what I called out as the invisible cage in my series on leisure. Work is the new cage, the new slavery — but there’s a reward. And to get a higher reward, or even the bare minimum, we drug ourselves to do so.
However, as I’ve come to realize, there are pros and cons to everything in life, and this too may also have some pros, after discussing the cons.
The Trade-Offs Being Bought
The chemical changes didn’t make the spiders “better survivors,” but a deeper look at Dr. Peter Witt’s raw data shows that certain substances did confer hyper-specific physical or behavioral advantages.
Spiders given minuscule amounts of LSD showed a massive spike in concentration and resistance to distractions. If a researcher tapped on the container or made a sudden noise, a normal spider would pause or flee. The LSD spider completely ignored the threat, hyper-focusing entirely on the task at hand.
However, they lost their environmental awareness and flexibility. A normal spider constantly improvises its web shape based on where twigs are or how the wind blows. The LSD spider became rigidly trapped in an internal mathematical loop, spinning at perfect angles even when the geometry didn’t make sense in the physical space it was in.
With caffeine, it gave the spiders an immediate surge of jittery energy. It completely stripped away any lethargy or hesitation. The spiders were highly motivated to start working and moved with intense urgency.
Unfortunately, it famously produced the most catastrophic, disorganized webs of all. Caffeine disrupted the spider’s short-term memory and spatial awareness. The spider would spin a thread, turn around, and completely forget where it was supposed to connect it.
It could no longer execute complex, multi-step sequences. It resulted in a chaotic mess of random lines with zero functional utility.
With marijuana (specifically THC), the spiders first started building their webs under the influence of cannabis; their lines were actually quite steady and reasonably spaced. However, there was a severe loss of motivation, focus, and stamina. The trade-off was that the spiders simply couldn’t maintain the mental momentum required to finish. They left massive, unfinished gaps in the web, rendering it useless for catching prey.
This is similar to how humans mirror this behavior in the modern workforce.
When looking at the workforce today, humans are constantly trying to hack these exact trade-offs. Most use caffeine to force their brains into overdrive to meet a deadline, trading away calm, structured thinking for raw speed. Or marijuana to wind down from stress, trading away our analytical drive and momentum for mental relaxation.
Biological Balance
If the goal is long-term health and overall stability, science shows that unnatural enhancements always come with a tax that the body eventually has to pay.
However, humans use enhancements because humans do not live in a purely natural ecosystem, unlike spiders. Humans live in an artificial world with artificial demands like deadlines, 12-hour shifts, exam weeks, and corporate competition.
Whether an enhancement is worth using comes down to situational application and personal decision.
For example, if a surgeon needs to stay alert during hour 14 of an emergency surgery, or a pilot needs to stay awake during an overnight flight, the extreme negative trade-offs of caffeine or prescription stimulants may be secondary to the immediate, critical need for raw alertness.
Drinking a cup of coffee only when you are fatigued on a long drive can be a positive because the immediate benefit (not crashing the car) heavily outweighs the potential of drowsing off and crashing the car — especially if you can’t rest.
The danger arises when enhancements are used to sustain an unsustainable lifestyle. If you drink massive amounts of caffeine every day to survive a job you hate on four hours of sleep, your system begins to burn out. The enhancement stops being a “boost” and becomes the baseline.
The best way to use these enhancements — if needed — is with the smallest dose possible. Techniques include:
Microdosing: Attempting to take amounts so small that the user gains a slight cognitive shift without triggering the chaotic impairment or physical crashes seen in high doses.
Cycling: Intentionally taking breaks from substances (like a “caffeine detox”) to reset the brain’s natural receptors and prevent permanent down-regulation.
Ultimately, enhancements are not inherently “good” or “bad.” Ideally, if society were functioning as it should, most would be able to get by without these enhancements. But these are sometimes needed in our world.
The key is to use them wisely and never use them in excess or chronically.
This is the paradox humans find ourselves in, and the good news is that humans are created optimally for this world; perfect just the way they are. Unfortunately, they live in a world that squeezes every drop of them.
These enhancements may offer a way to break free from this slavery, but they must be used wisely.
Takeaways
The sober human brain, like the spider’s, is already optimized by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Every chemical “boost” is really the system malfunctioning in a way that happens to look useful to us.
Every enhancement is a trade-off. Caffeine buys speed at the cost of executive function; cannabis buys calm at the cost of momentum; stimulants buy drive at the cost of precision. Nature offers no free upgrades.
The real problem isn’t the substance—it’s the artificial world. We drug ourselves to survive an environment we were never built for. The 90%+ caffeine dependency is a symptom of the invisible cage, not a personal failing.
The line that matters is strategic tool vs. lifestyle crutch. A substance used rarely and tactically is a net positive. A substance used daily to sustain an unsustainable life becomes the baseline required just to avoid withdrawal.
Enhancements are biological credit cards. Borrow occasionally and pay it back with rest, and the system works. Charge it every day and bankruptcy is inevitable.
Next Action Items
Run your own sobriety audit—today. Pick the substance you reach for most automatically (probably caffeine) and skip it for a single day. Notice what shows up: the fatigue, yes, but also the clarity and the honest read on how much work is actually on your plate. That evaluation is the whole point.
Identify your one “crutch.” Name the substance you use daily not for a strategic reason but just to stay at baseline. That’s the one quietly charging interest.
Introduce one cycling habit this week. Schedule a fixed break—a caffeine detox day, a no-THC stretch—to let your natural receptors reset before dependence deepens.
Reframe before you reach. Next time you grab an enhancement, ask one question: strategic tool or lifestyle crutch? Am I borrowing for a real emergency, or charging the card again?
Revisit the cage. Re-read Life Is Dull, and That’s the Point alongside the leisure series to connect this substance dependency to the larger invisible cage of modern work—the environment that’s actually driving all of it.
As always, thanks for the time and attention. Have a great and wonderful day.
— Ashe,
Franklin O’Kanu
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When I read your article, I recalled this ‘documentary’ video, and I just had to search for it.
Hinterland Who's Who: Spiders On Drugs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHzdsFiBbFc
When I first saw this vid many years ago, I thought it was a serious documentary; now every time I watch this parody it makes my stomach hurt from laughing!
Thank you Franklin O’Kanu for the article and the memory.
I think the reason most of rely upon substances to get through the day is that we know, on a deep, deep level, that we are nothing but slaves and using our drug of choice is the only way to make it through another day. Believe this is why there are so many addicts out there now, society is built to demean and degrade us so why not pop a pill, snort a line, spike a vein in order to get a tiny bit of relief. Good news is that a lot of us have started waking up to the nature of the game that's been played without us knowing the rules, now that we're learning how to play it correctly there will be mass change in the near future.